


5 Times Natasha Said No (and one time she didn't)

by Stargirl



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 5 + 1, Also wrote a follow up but I don't like it, F/M, idk this is not stellar, marriage proposals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 00:37:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5354303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stargirl/pseuds/Stargirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 + 1 fic about marriage proposals. Fluffy and sweet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5 Times Natasha Said No (and one time she didn't)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this years ago. It's not what I would call my best work but I thought I'd post it anyway.

“This is fucking terrible. Seriously, where in the hell did you get this absolute shit, Clint? This is the worst fucking coffee I’ve ever had.” Natasha makes her disgust for the dollar cappuccino Clint bought her at the drugstore across the street from the Russian safe house they are currently in well known. He can’t help but grin, though. She has this adorable pout in her lips when something doesn’t please her, and this coffee definitely qualifies. 

She is now cussing the coffee out in some language he doesn’t know – Hungarian, maybe? – as she roots through the miniscule cupboards for what must be the fourth time, looking for something edible with caffeine in it that she might have missed before.

“Are you sure they didn’t have tea? Or coffee beans? Anything that’s more palatable than this scheisse,” she asks without turning around.

He laughs. “Tash, that store is 50 square feet, max. I didn’t miss anything. They had first aid supplies, and a coffee machine.” He pauses. “They did have slushies, though, darling. Would you like one?” Clint offers innocently. She whirls around to face him, and Clint swears that if looks could kill he would be dead.

“All I want is some goddamn coffee. I hate this town! Why the fuck are we here, anyway? For some fucking stupid surveillance job that a first year agent could do, no problem!” 

Clint just smiles at her. His spider has a temper as fiery as her hair, all right. That is one of the many things he loves about her.

“Marry me,” he says almost without thinking. She freezes mid-rant (this time in German) and just stares at him.

“What?” she chokes out.

“Marry me, Tasha. I love you, and I want us to get married.” He smiles at her again. She throws the coffee at his head and storms out. Clint takes that as a no (for now).

 

 

 

  
The second time Clint Barton proposes to Natasha Romanoff is several months after the first time. They haven’t discussed it. Natasha had returned to the safe house several hours later, with two cups of very good coffee, and they completed their mission as if nothing had happened.

This time, they are seated in one of the mini-kitchens-slash-dining rooms that SHIELD provides for agents to store food and eat if they aren’t dining in the cafeteria. They don’t have any missions taking place in the immediate future so their attire is civilian.

Natasha is eating a sub sandwich that Clint had bought in the cafeteria a few days ago but never got to finish, and he is eating a bowl of soup that had been marked as free for anyone to eat. She giggles at something he said (he forgot, she has that effect on him) and his heart swells just a bit more.

“Will you marry me, Nat?” he asks softly. She looks up at him and sees the sincerity in his eyes. But-

“No.” Her answer is short, but not unkind. Clint just smiles and steals a bite of her (his) sandwich. No one ever said that love was easy.

“Alright.” He will wait for her, no matter how long she takes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
Half a year has passed since he last asked her. Part of Natasha hopes that he has given up, though she knows that this cannot be. She wakes up alone in their bed and even though it is the middle of the night (in the middle of winter, no less) she knows where to find him. She slips on a sweater and boots and makes her way up to the roof.

She sees him standing near the edge, just looking out over the world. She knows he won’t have his hearing aids in so she touches his back gently to alert him to her presence. He turns and looks at her, and words are not needed. He slips his arm around her shoulder and together they look upon the wintry sky. Finally he turns to her. Putting his mouth close to her ear, he whispers. 

“Marry me.”

She embraces him but then pulls back so that she can reply. He reads her lips when she says no. He nods and then kisses her. She smiles when he pulls away and says ’I love you’ in a voice so soft he wouldn’t have been able to hear her even with hearing aids, but he sees and understands. She is afraid that her rejecting his wish for them to be wed will be taken as her rejecting him.

“I love you, Tasha.” She smiles when he whispers the words she needed to hear against her ear.

They go back to his room and fall asleep embracing each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
The fourth time, Clint tries a different tactic. He will be training new recruits for the day (the usual instructor is taking a personal day, something to do with a particularly cocky batch of newbies and patience wearing thin) and he knows Natasha will most likely come and watch. When he has to do things like this she always does, gazing into the training room from the walkway two stories above. Usually about three recruits notice her, but are too scared to mention it. The rest are too absorbed in the training to even look up at all.

But on days like this she always sleeps in for an extra hour or so before coming to observe. So he wakes up, showers, gets ready for the day, but before he leaves their room (officially it is his but even Hill has figured out that Natasha never sleeps in her own bed by now, so it has become ‘theirs’) he leaves her a note.

Tasha-  
Will you be my wife?

He draws a small arrow in the bottom corner of the sheet as a signature and leaves the note on their bedside table.

An hour and a half later, as he oversees the newbies sparring, he sees a beautiful redhead appear on the walkway. She leans against the railing and smiles at him (a genuine, happy smile) and for a minute he thinks maybe she will say yes. She tosses a paper airplane down at him and he snatches it out of the air. Luckily the majority of the agents-in-training are too occupied to notice, and the ones who do see quickly turn away when Clint glares at them.

He unfolds the sheet of notebook paper the plane was made of, and smiles when he sees what she had written.

Clint-  
No.

She had penciled in a small black spider as her signature. 

He looks back up at her. She smirks and blows him a kiss before walking away.

Maybe next time.

 

 

 

The fifth time, Natasha is preparing to go on a solo mission. It’s a highly classified information-gathering job, but she told Clint the details anyway. She will pose as a grad student, charm a Norwegian scientist, steal a copy of the information on the project he is working on, and walk right out the front door. It is a simple, low-risk job, and Clint isn’t worried for her safety (this time).

She is all set to leave, evening dress and casual clothes already stored safely on the helicopter she will be taking into Norway. Currently she is dressed in her catsuit for the drop.

“Agent Romanoff! Departure in two minutes.” Maria Hill strides over to Clint and Natasha, who are talking quietly.

“Got it. Thanks, Hill.” Natasha nods at the woman. She turns back to Clint. “I have to go now. See you soon, my hawk.” She would kiss him except that there are people nearby (including Hill, even if she already knows they are together due to an unfortunate incident involving a fire drill in the middle of the night) so she just waves and turns to leave.

“Tasha,” Clint calls after her. “Marry me?” Hill chokes on the water she is currently drinking but Natasha doesn’t even pause as she flips Clint the bird. He smiles at her back as she boards the helicopter and knows that he will pay for asking in front of Hill when she returns.

“Don’t tell Fury, please,” Clint says to Hill as they watch the helicopter (and Natasha) disappear over the horizon. Hill just nods, words escaping her. She didn’t think that their relationship was so serious. She is supposed to report things like this to Fury, but as a favor to agents Barton and Coulson she has kept quiet about this aspect of their partnership. She doesn’t like the “no romance” rule, anyway. Black Widow and Hawkeye had always worked well together, and that hadn’t changed when they started sleeping together two years ago. It’s hard to find love that lasts, as her dateless self could testify to, and she is happy for them.

 

 

 

It has been three months since Clint had proposed to her in front of Hill, and they haven’t spoken about it (as per usual), but Natasha has been giving it a lot of thought. And she’s made up her mind.

Currently they are in Budapest. It is supposed to be a simple, in-and-out information job (Natasha wears a pretty dress, goes to a party, and charms the old bastard they’re conning into taking her up to his hotel room, where she would take the needed information from his laptop, with Clint as her backup from the neighboring roof, of course) but something has gone terribly wrong. The mark knows they are coming and has multiplied his security by at least five times, and has quite a few guards hidden in his bedroom. Natasha has barely made it out alive, with three-dozen guards toting handguns and tasers making themselves known as she had searched for the laptop. She wouldn’t have made it at all if it weren’t for Clint warning her that she has a half-dozen guns pointed at her back. She has to dive out the fourth-story window to avoid the hailstorm of bullets currently flying at her back.

A good half-hour after that particular catastrophe, they are back-to-back, shooting at anything that moves. They have taken out at least three-fourths of the small army the mark had hired, but the last quarter is very persistent. Natasha shoots two coming in on her right side in their foreheads before her gun clicks empty.

“Ammo?” Clint asks from her side as he shoots another guard with an exploding arrow, detonating it as others take his place. At least four drop to the ground.

“Two magazines left,” Black Widow replies as she clicks in one of them. Clint hisses. He doesn’t know if that’s enough.

It’s not.

She has three bullets. He has two arrows. There are at least thirty guards left.

“Hey Tasha,” Clint calls out, though she hasn’t left his side since they have backed in here. She knows whatever he is about to say is going to be deeply personal, because in the field it is always “Hawkeye” and “Black Widow” with them.

“Yeah?”

“In case we die today, I love you.” He shoots one precious arrow in between two guards steadily advancing on their sheltered position, detonating it a second later. Two down, twenty-eight to go, with only four projectiles between them. It is possible that they will live, but equally as possible that one of the guards will actually hit one of them. They can’t risk going into the open to snatch more weapons and ammo, but they also can’t risk letting one close enough to their sheltered corner alive to steal weapons.

A bullet flies past Natasha’s shoulder. “Clint,” she shoots the offending person who loosed the bullet. “In case we live today, yes.”

“What?” Clint ducks as a bullet buries itself in the wall behind them.

“Yes. I say yes.” She calmly pulls the trigger, launching her second-to-last bullet.

“You-you’ll marry me? Really?” Clint is frozen, gaping at Natasha, and a bullet, as reward for his carelessness, almost grazes him.

“Yeah. If you can get us out of here alive and in no more than two pieces each, I’ll marry you.”

Suffice to say, Clint quickly conceives a plan to escape (a mostly-successful plan, too. Natasha was only tased once.) Afterwards she rues the loss of her thousand-dollar dress, which was destroyed in the battle, and Clint tells her to just wear a SHIELD-supplied dress next time. She glares and tells him that next time they almost die, she’s keeping her mouth shut.


End file.
